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I have been asking the question about this subject to some oracle pros in the area. Their reply is that if you are certified for both 8i and 9i, you are more likely to get an offer than simply with a 9i. A lot of companies here are committed to 8i for a long while, the main reason being 9i is too buggy, and the upgrade considered unnecessary for now and a pain in the ass to boot. In fact, a lot of companies still use 7.x, with a few still earlier versions. Also, it's cowtown. Anyone with differing views?

Trying to remain objective, since one can always be wrong.....without knowing it at the moment.

I would think that that is correct. The company I am in now does not have any 9i databases as of yet. Let's face it, the main reason a company will upgrade is the fact that Oracle stops supporting older versions. If you have a production database and find out that Oracle is no longer going to support the version it is on, it will usually get upgraded.
This is not the only reason but certainly one of the most "motivational" I would think.

Another thing to consider is that if you do land a job and that company is going to upgrade to 9i they will want you to be familiar with both versions since these upgrades usually do not happen overnight.

Originally posted by THEGUY I have been asking the question about this subject to some oracle pros in the area. Their reply is that if you are certified for both 8i and 9i, you are more likely to get an offer than simply with a 9i. A lot of companies here are committed to 8i for a long while, the main reason being 9i is too buggy, and the upgrade considered unnecessary for now and a pain in the ass to boot. In fact, a lot of companies still use 7.x, with a few still earlier versions. Also, it's cowtown. Anyone with differing views?

I agree with you. Very few companies in high-tech Finland have moved to 9i, not even a single instalation of RAC has been yet made here.

I heard of a 7 instalation some months ago. They have said: "Oracle 7 is enough for our needs."

I'm sure there are installations happening, although, I think people are very hesitant to install/upgrade to 9i at the moment. 8i will be the primary installation for at least another 2 years in my opinion, and 7 is still around, and that came out ... well, before 1997 anyway.

Oracle have advised me that 8.1.7 is expected to be de-supported 31/01/03.

This is not very far away. Of course companies can still log support calls for a few years after that, but Oracle are not comitted to resolving their issues within any timescale, nor are they committed to fixing bugs after this date.

As a Dba, I would not be happy supporting mission-critical databases with this sort of limited backup from Oracle.

We are currently upgrading 8.1.6 to 8.1.7, later next year I will upgrade all our production sites to 9i (hopefully a relatively stable version by then!).

8i will be around for a while

I am not a DBA (actually in Software Tech Support). The majority of our customers are of the Fortune 500 variety and at least a couple of them are still using 7.3.4 as a backend. I have yet to talk to any that are planning on going to 9i (many of them have only recently upgraded to 8.1.6 from 8.0, 8.1.5 etc, there are a few that have gone to 8.1.7). I think 8i will be in demand as a skill set for a while.

Re: 8i will be around for a while

Originally posted by bharris I am not a DBA (actually in Software Tech Support). The majority of our customers are of the Fortune 500 variety and at least a couple of them are still using 7.3.4 as a backend. I have yet to talk to any that are planning on going to 9i (many of them have only recently upgraded to 8.1.6 from 8.0, 8.1.5 etc, there are a few that have gone to 8.1.7). I think 8i will be in demand as a skill set for a while.

Has anybody taken the upgrade (9i) exam yet?

[Edited by bharris on 12-01-2001 at 10:39 PM]

9i upgrade went into production yesterday. Somebody might have of course taken the beta-exam. As far as I remember only one person in this forum mentioned he tried the beta. I am studing now hard for the upgrade. I recently attended Oracle's ILT "9i: new features for DBAs" and I have been playing for some time with 9i. I must say 9i upgrade will not be easy. There is simply too much new stuff. I am still trying to assimilate/memorize/comprehend the new features of RMAN. There are so many new commands. Also, there is a lot of new stuff on SQL. The new features concerning undo segements and Oracle managed files are easy and understandable, although with practical value is 0 for good DBAs, that new stuff is for DBOs, DBBSs or developer DBAs. I still wonder how Oracle could not figure out that we should be able to create users with default index tablespace. In 9i, Larry & team have introduced default temp tablespace for the DB, which is good, but I would have prefered to have a default index tablespace. All my developers make there indexes in the default tablespace, although many times I have explained the proper way. I think many of you rebuild indexes in the index tablespaces too. There is a lot of additional new rubish in 9i, featues, just features. What I like most is probably the possibility to have different block sizes for different tablespaces. This is very usefull for my DBs.

But if I have to say what is really new and different in 9i compared to pre-9i version, there is no doubt: RAC! Cache fusion finally works the way it should work.

RE: Marketability of OCP8i after the track ends

Go for the 8i certification. I currently work for a company that has 7, 8i and 9i databases. Some of the new systems are being built using 9i, but most are still being built on 8i. Industry is very slow to upgrade due to reliability fears with new products. The 8i certification will be relevant for a long time after Oracle stop supporting it.

I've just passed the New Features 9i beta. It was a tough exam, 191 badly written questions in 3 hours. I think the production exam will be 56 questions in 1.5 hours. Much nicer!

9i has loads of new features. The upgrade exam is much harder than the 8i upgrade. My exam prep was quite extensive but the shear volume of stuff was quite daunting.

I wrote small articles on most of the subject areas. You can read them on my site: